Tomb of the Nine Gods

D&D's latest published adventure, Tomb of Annihilation, is inspired by the original Tomb of Horrors, a dungeon created by Gary Gygax (or, in-game, created by the evil-even-by-Lich-standards Acererak (thankfully only pronounced as three syllables: As-SER-ak) to massacre even high-level players.

The eponymous Tomb in Tomb of Annihilation is actually canonically compatible with the Tomb of Horrors, as Acererak apparently likes to travel around the multiverse creating these death traps for various nefarious purposes. Even though I'm going to get a little spoilery in this post, I'll keep the purpose of this new Tomb secret for those who might want to play this adventure.

Tomb of Annihilation (as mentioned in a previous post) has the party explore the jungles of Chult, encountering plenty of other ruins and adventures as they search for the source of a curse that has interfered with resurrection magic. Not only are the recently dead unable to be brought back to life, but those who had previously been raised from the dead are beginning to waste away (this does not seem to apply to the undead, except that Liches haven't been able to feed the spirits of the dead to their phylacteries.)

After searching the jungle, players will finally find the lost city of Omu, home of an ancient Chultan civilization that was destroyed mysteriously hundreds of years back. The Omuans initially worshipped Uptao, but at some point they traded that god for nine animal trickster gods. Later, Acererak would come to Omu and slay the nine gods, using the Omuans as slave labor to construct a horrific death trap that served as the gods' tomb, before slaughtering his slaves by forcing them to run through the tomb as, essentially, playtesters.

The Tomb of the Nine Gods is thus the main dungeon of the adventure, and nearly every room has some kind of lethal trap.

There are monsters to fight within, and certainly some might indeed be highly dangerous, but the main threat is going to be the traps, which require the clever solving of puzzles to navigate in any semblance of safety - and even when done correctly, there's often still great danger or dark prices to pay.

While the pre-Tomb adventure has some highly dangerous parts, the Tomb is going to be a total horror show - one in which player characters are highly likely to die in sudden and gruesome ways. The book actually contains plenty of suggestions for how to incorporate new characters players will be forced to roll after their old ones are killed, because that's kind of the expectation.

The only real counterbalance to the deadly, often unintuitive, traps is that players can receive assistance from the dead gods within the tomb - though this comes with a price as well, as the gods will impose their personality flaws on players who receive their gifts (though this is a fantastic opportunity for very silly roleplay.)

It is not impossible to break the global curse and it's even possible to escape the tomb alive, but it will not be easy.